Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [63]
Although the Barbie who emerges in Maybee's and Lawrence's fiction is slim, smart, and adept at winning national talent competitions, she manages to escape total obnoxiousness through a couple of humanizing imperfections. One is her sexual insecurity: Never mind that she looks great; she fears that other women look better and will divert male attention away from her. In Bette Lou Maybee's "Barbie's Big Prom," published in Barbie magazine's inaugural issue, she smolders with jealousy during the visit of her cousin, an orange-haired hussy from New Orleans. Barbie's other refreshing flaw is her petulance; she is moody, afflicted with "rare streaks of being just plain ornery," which today might be diagnosed as premenstrual huffs.
Issues of friendship and "popularity" arise as frequently in Barbie's fictive world as they do in high school. Barbie has male and female friends, but in the early stories her relationships with members of her own gender are rocky. Perhaps as a consequence of her chronic sexual jealousy, Barbie's sidekicks are invariably less comely and clever than she. Midge is "a round berry" with an impulsiveness that clouds her judgment, so eager in Cynthia Lawrence's "My Friend the Pioneer" to impress a certain boy that she lies about her wilderness skills, endangering Barbie and herself. Then there's Jody Perkins, an astrology nut whose greatest aspiration is to marry money. "There are more important things to dream about than being rich," Barbie reprimands. "Name one," Jody counters.
Lawrence's Barbie Solves a Mystery, in which Barbie's sleuthing straightens out the life of a prominent Willows-born fashion designer, cries out for comparison with Nancy Drew. And the two gumshoes have more in common than their golden hair. Ned Nickerson, Nancy's beau, is as much of a dishrag as Ken—indeed, Ned is so ineffectual that Nancy's car runs faster than his. The "man" in Nancy's life is, of course, Carson Drew, her widowed father, whose stunning inability to solve cases without his daughter has curiously never impaired his professional standing. Barbie, by contrast, does not turn to her father when Ken proves inadequate; she dates other boys. There is little incestuous tension in the Barbie novels. Mr. and Mrs. Roberts are very much a separate unit.
Barbie and Nancy have personality differences, too. In Rascals at Large, or the Clue in the Old Nostalgia, Arthur Prager suggests that for prepubescent girls, identifying with Nancy "is within reach. . . . She is pretty but not beautiful." Identifying with Barbie is harder, but, because of her humanizing imperfections, not impossible. Nancy also has a richer spectrum of sidekicks with whom less-conventional girls can identify, ranging from necktie-wearing George to frilly Bess, who quakes at the sight of spiders.
This is not to say Barbie doesn't have a supporting cast—by far the strangest of which is "Big Bertha," a self-hating size fourteen who develops an unwholesome fixation on Barbie in Lawrence's "The Size 10 Dress." Humiliated during a hygiene class "weigh-in," Big B. waddles off to the doctor, who places her on a diet. As Bertha suffers a cruel withdrawal from cream pies, Barbie, who has no trouble extending herself to blubbery girls, cheers her on. Then a funny thing happens. Bertha not only slims down, she transforms herself into Barbie—affecting the same ponytail, the same clothes, even the same laugh. Barbie tries to be tolerant; after all, Bertha's mom is dead and, consequently, unavailable for fashion guidance. Naturally Bertha would want to model herself on the most tasteful girl in school. But having a doppelganger freaks her out, and in the great tradition of smalltown Protestants who have not been psychoanalyzed, she is seized by "emotions